This proposal before the Ohio House would cost taxpayers and deny needy families resources they need to survive.

A Republican lawmaker has introduced a bill that would subject Ohio Medicaid recipients to random drug tests in order to receive benefits from the state-subsidized health program.

[…]

Gary Daniels, associate director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio, doesn’t see Balderson’s legislation going anywhere. “I have a hard time taking it seriously as an actual proposal,” he said.

Daniels called the proposed law unconstitutional. He cited a case from about a decade ago, Marchwinski v. Howard, in which a Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with a previous ruling that struck down a Michigan law that tied public assistance to drug testing.

Daniels said the approach Balderson calls for has been been proposed many times in the past by states but is too “costly and ineffective” to work. He noted that the bill doesn’t mention how the state would pay for the drug-testing program. He speculated that Balderson introduced the bill to appear “tough on crime.”

Invasive and possibly ineffective body scanners will be implemented soon in Columbus and several other airports around the country.

If you plan to fly from Port Columbus when the weather warms up, there’s a good chance you’ll have to step into a full-body scanner first.

The airport expects to receive at least two full-body scanners by late spring or early summer to enhance its security screenings.

Airport officials are awaiting final confirmation and further details from the Transportation Security Administration, which will pay for and operate the scanners. Columbus had been put on a list by the TSA last year to receive the full-body scanners, said Rod Borden, chief operating officer of the Columbus Regional Airport Authority.

TSA spokesman Jon Allen said the 150 body scanners the TSA has already secured are manufactured by Rapiscan and cost $160,000 apiece. They will be distributed across the country in coming months.

The ABJ praises the Ohio Supreme Court over their recent ruling requiring police to obtain a warrant before they search someone’s cell phone.

Justice Judith Lanzinger put the challenge in four words: ”Cell phones defy categorization.” Yet the courts must plunge into the task, anyway, seeking to draw clear distinctions and critical boundaries involving police searches and seizures in criminal investigations. On Tuesday, Lanzinger, writing for a 4-3 majority of the Ohio Supreme Court, delivered a careful argument, and the majority landed where it belonged. It upheld the Fourth Amendment principle protecting an individual’s reasonable expectation of privacy.

The decision stemmed from a drug case. A woman taken to the hospital after a drug overdose agreed during questioning by police officers to call her drug dealer. Police officers soon arrested the dealer, and in doing so, confiscated his cell phone, eventually recovering call records and phone numbers. A jury convicted the dealer for trafficking in cocaine and other charges. He received 12 years in prison.

The defendant appealed his conviction, arguing that the trial court erred in failing to suppress the evidence found on the cell phone. The court of appeals upheld the conviction. A 2-1 majority sided with the trial court, reaffirming the view that a cell phone is essentially a closed container and thus subject to search during a lawful arrest.

The Ohio Supreme Court issued a wonderful ruling yesterday affirming that police officers must have a warrant before they search a person’s cell phone.

Police can’t examine the contents of a suspect’s cell phone without a warrant, a divided Ohio Supreme Court ruled yesterday in a first-of-its-kind case over privacy and technology.

[…]

The American Civil Liberties Union, which filed a friend-of-the-court brief supporting Smith’s position, contends that as cell phones become more like personal computers, the data they hold should be protected from unreasonable intrusions.

“There is so much information that we keep in our cell phones,” ACLU of Ohio lawyer Carrie Davis said yesterday. “It is not a simple telephone. Because of that, people have an expectation that the information they keep will be private.”

Lanzinger’s majority opinion was joined by Chief Justice Thomas J. Moyer and Justices Paul E. Pfeifer and Maureen O’Connor.

Troubling reports of Columbus police officers randomly searching public buses raise questions over whether individuals are are to decline a search and how the police choose who is searched.

The Central Ohio Transit Authority is now using police dogs to increase security, 10TV’s Angela An reported Wednesday.

While assaults against passengers and drivers are down compared to last year, police made 35 percent more arrests this year on buses and bus stops. There have been 158 arrests to date in 2009, An reported.

“The reason we started with bomb dogs is to make sure people aren’t bringing suspicious packages on the buses and leaving them behind,” said COTA’s security director Stan Alverson.

The dogs are joining undercover officers in searching for anything illegal, from explosives to drugs.

This week the Ohio Supreme Court heard a case challenging whether police have a right to search through a person’s cell phone without a court order.

Police may be able to take cell phones from people they arrest, but that doesn’t give them the right to scroll through call logs in search of incriminating information without a warrant, a defense attorney told the Ohio Supreme Court yesterday.

[…]

The case has attracted interest from outside groups. The American Civil Liberties Union filed a brief on behalf of Smith, while the Ohio Prosecuting Attorneys Association filed a brief in favor of police and prosecutors.

The court is expected to rule in several months.

Despite the U.S. Supreme Court categorically forbidding schools from doing so, a school in Iowa strip searched a group of students because a sum of money went missing.

School’s in! September’s here; pencils are sharpened, apples are polished, and — in one Iowa town where administrators’ summer reading list clearly did not include Safford Unified School Dist. #1 v. Redding — female students are strip-searched on suspicion of theft.

The Des Moines Register reported over the weekend that on Aug. 21, the third day of school, a student at Atlantic High reported $100 missing from her purse. Five girls who were somehow deemed persons of interest in the case were asked to strip in front of a female counselor and their accuser (!?). (No boys were involved because apparently none were around when the theft was believed to have occurred.) Lawyers (yuh!) for the girls’ families told the Register that (paraphrase) each girl stripped in varying degrees. One 15-year-old “was asked to remove all of her clothing including her undergarments.” Another asked if she could lift up her bra and was told that wasn’t good enough. One was searched twice. At least two were permitted not to remove their underwear because it was more revealing than the others’ and therefore an unlikely hiding place. [End of repellent soft-core juvie prison scene]

Students, have you been strip-searched at school? Tell us about it.